This is a conversation I like to have with myself:
R: I need to write.
R: I would like, instead, to wash all of my silk dresses by hand.
R: You’re going to really regret it. The book is almost finished. What if you wrote a short story?
R: What is this?? I’m trying to do something already; I’m trying to do something not very hard and not very depres— A short story? I’d rather bear children, right here on this floor.
R: So, to the soap then.
This is the kind of person I am and, motivated toward a better legacy, struggle and struggle:
At nine years of age I wrote a novel, handwritten, in a blue notebook, a great deal of pages, all of which, upon editing at the end of each day, I would read aloud to my sister. When I felt I had completed it, I was overcome with the knowledge that I was a terrible, shallow, talentless person and the book was going to reveal these facts to the world. I filled a bathtub with water and dumped the book in it. Twenty minutes later, I came back to find the book had only barely submerged. I pressed the bound book with both hands to the bottom of the tub, strangling it, imagining the pencil lead crying on the pages. When I realized it wasn’t going at all like I had imagined, I took the book out and stripped the pages, tearing them into tiny pieces. I threw the half-wet confetti in a black trashbag and hurled it where trashbags go.
I still don’t regret it.
